I've read a terrifying short story about that once. It was about a man that never died. The universe just grew ever more unlikely and absurd around him due to quantum immortality.
In "Ilium/Olympos" by Dan Simmons, the post-human society is riddled with quantum magic. Achilles has had his future narrowed down to two possibilities: dying at a specific time after being shot in the heel by an arrow shot by Paris, or dying of old age in bed.
The idea if quantum immortality was one of the first things I thought when I read about multiple universes.
I never did research on it an it was just a week ago that I heard this was "a thing" but it wasn't a sound theory, for all the reasons that wiki article mentions.
I guess, I wanted to live with the thought that it was possible, that's why I never researched about it.
Thanks for the link, I imagined that my life would become like in the story too, lol.
I don't think you want to believe that it's possible.
There was a short story once without science fiction trappings, more fantasy/horror, where someone observes that the gravedigger in a small southern town always knows to dig a grave in advance. He asks what happens if the graves aren't dug, and he's told they have to be.
He plays a game of guessing who a grave will be for, but one day he's told that he'll never guess this time, and then he learns his parents were in a car crash. There's one grave, presumably for one or the other of them.
So he murders the gravedigger with his shovel, buries him in the grave that was dug for another, and both of his parents survive.
But then nobody in the town dies. His mother is paralyzed, and there's still hope, but then she has a stroke. And then there's a big fire. And nobody dies.
Finally, he takes the gravediggers tools, which have been inconspicuously following him around, and goes and digs all the needed graves.
The end of the story is that he's now old and worn out and looking forward to resting after spending many years as the new gravedigger.
Same here, although I worried (still worry) of the conceivable possibility of dead-end branches where death becomes logically inevitable for some reason, that the laws of physics don’t always provide an escape route.
On the other hand, I tell myself that empirically it’s always only other people that die, never oneself.
>the conceivable possibility of dead-end branches where death becomes logically inevitable for some reason
Wouldn't that be all deaths? If "dying" is a single quantum event, then by the time it happens, death in the ordinary sense has been finalized.
We're not atomic particles. Even if I stand at ground zero at a nuclear explosion, I can't expect to be saved by some improbable malfunction of the bomb, because as instant as the explosion seems, I don't vanish instantly, even if it's faster than nerves can react.
Normal probability and physical law should apply until the bomb irretrievably has gone off and I'm almost completely vaporized. The only way to resurrect me would be to essentially recreate me from scratch, and a universe around me.
Edit: Found it. "Divided by infinity": https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/